Ever since its inauguration in the spring of 2008, Namal College has been looked at as an institution which brings high quality education for youth living in Punjab.
Imran Khan and Aamir Matin at the recent Cisco Networking Academy inauguration
Referred to as the brainchild of Imran Khan, the famous Pakistani philantrophist and politican, it is the first higher education institute which is offering diploma courses and bachelors degrees – including a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering -- in rural Pakistan.
Located some 30 kilometers from the city of Mianwali and 3 hours drive from Islamabad, Namal College is affiliated with the University of Bradford in the UK, which also granted it Associate College status.
The senior management of Namal College intends to link academic programs with professional training and reached out to Cisco to join the Cisco Networking Academy program.
Attended by Imran Khan and Cisco Pakistan general manager Aamir Matin, Cisco Networking Academy at Namal College was officially launched around end of September this year. The first group of 20 students are joining the Cisco Networking Academy community in Pakistan, with current count of close to 5,000 students and 52 academies across the country.
We helped the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) kick off their “China 2.0: Rise of a Digital Superpower” conference in Beijing today with a discussion over telepresence that reconnected two of the pioneering engineers who worked to bring connectivity to China -- Dr. Les Cottrell of the Stanford Linear Accelator Center (SLAC) and Prof. Xu Rengshang of Beijing’s Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP).
Back in 1991 teams from both academic institutions worked with ‘dogged perserverence’ over a 3 year period to establish a link to aid their research, working with AT&T using DECnet over a satellite connection from Point Reyes, north of San Francisco, over to Beijing Airport, and the using several subsequent hops to connect to IHEP itself. Les told me a little bit about his fascinating journey in bringing the Internet to Beijing after the telepresence session in San Jose today (the actual conference is taking place in the Grand Millenium Hotel in Beijing for the next couple of days):
As of last week, the Kyrgyz National Information Technology Center is home to the first IPv6 lab in the Central Asian region. Donated by Cisco, the lab helps train IT specialist in Kyrgyzstan on next generation internet protocol (IPv6) technologies.
As delegates convene for the Fifth Annual United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Meeting today, a busy agenda is awaiting them, spanning topics such as the “Access and Diversity”, “The future of privacy”, “Protecting the consumer in an online world”, the status of IPv6 around the globe, multilingual internet, digital inclusion, child safety, cloud computing and many others.
I’m reading about a 24-year-old who started a computer skills business in his bedroom and now has three training centers. This isn’t in the San Jose Mercury News, though. It’s in Kenya’s Daily Nation and the young man in question, Stephen Orioki, is more than your average entrepreneur.
As the head of a tech training business in Kibera, one of Africa’s largest shanty towns, he is not so much worried about venture capital as whether he will get through the day without a power cut. His launch pad was the Cisco Networking Academy, which has been training Kiberans since 2007.
